The Problem of Consciousness by John R Searle: Week 4 Post 6:

John R Searle writes about consciousness and how it is the most important phenomena that we have yet to figure out. He begins his argument by first defining what it is he means by consciousness in the first place to clarify the main target. What he means by consciousness is the subjective states of awareness that begin in the morning after we wake until we fall back to sleep at night. He goes on to say that consciousness is a biological phenomena but that it is subjective and that everyone experiences consciousness in their own private way. Overall Searle breaks down the idea of consciousness to mean basically just being awake and being aware, being conscious not unconscious like you would be if you were sleeping. I found this particularly fascinating because throughout this whole class I have yet to really learn a clear definition of what philosophers mean by consciousness until I read what Searle had to say about it.
Searle goes on to answer his question as to how consciousness relates to the brain by stating that conscious states are caused by lower level neurobiological processes in the brain that are higher level features of the brain. The brain interprets all the external stimuli of the world into variable rates of neuron firings at synapses. This is the type of idea that Crick was referring to that consciousness was nothing more than a conversion of our external world made by the nervous system into one medium, namely, variable rates of neuron firings at synapses.